A Year Later, Homegrown Terror Still Baffles Britons

By ALAN COWELL; Karla Adam contributed reporting from Leeds for this article.

Published: July 6, 2006

CORRECTION APPENDED

One year after three of the four London transit bombers set out from a grim neighborhood called Beeston, in Leeds, the place they left behind forever is keeping its secrets to itself.

And, with some anxiety, Britons are still asking what inspired the onslaught by British-born Muslims, and whether the dark undercurrents of July 7, 2005, could resurface in a new attack.

Gous Ali, a 31-year-old property developer, for instance, traveled to Beeston recently with a single question on his mind: why did people from that northern town, British-born like him, from his same immigrant generation, drive a rental car to London last July and kill 52 people, including his partner, Neetu Jain, who died when one of their bombs exploded on a No. 30 bus?

But he does not feel he really learned.

''They don't want any intrusion -- they want to be left alone,'' Mr. Ali said in an interview. ''They are hiding from the shame, the embarrassment, the horror of what was created here.''

His assessment plays into an increasingly rancorous debate a year after the four bombers struck on three Underground trains and a bus. The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is locked in recrimination with Muslim leaders, who say the authorities have failed to reduce Muslim discontent.

Many Muslims, like Asghar Khan, a 36-year-old postal worker in Beeston, are insisting that the government do more to investigate the origins of the attack. ''Why did they do it? How can we prevent it? What lessons can we learn?'' Mr. Khan asked in an interview. He demanded ''some answers.''

In May the authorities did produce what they called a narrative of the July 7 attacks, the country's worst peacetime atrocity. But, said Beverly Martin, who edits a campaigning Web site seeking more detail about the bombings, ''the narrative only served to raise more questions than it attempted to answer in the first place.''

Even the police say they do not fully understand the events of July 7.

''We need to know who else, apart from the bombers, knew what they were planning,'' Peter Clarke, the head of London's counterterrorism police, said Monday. ''Did anyone encourage them? Did anyone help them with money, accommodation or expertise in bomb-making?

Such questions have fueled an uneasy sense that currents of extremist Islamic fervor may still course through a small minority of the country's 1.6 million Muslims.

An opinion survey published Tuesday in The Times of London, for instance, said 13 percent of British Muslims believed that the bombers should be viewed as ''martyrs'' and that 7 percent felt suicide attacks on civilians were justifiable.

Another recent survey by the Washington-based Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 15 percent of British Muslims believed violence against civilian targets could ''sometimes'' be justified.

Moreover, some Muslim leaders accuse the government of failing to assuage their concerns or lessen a sense of alienation.

''There has been limited progress but there is an air of despondency,'' said Sadiq Khan, a Muslim member of Parliament.

But Mr. Blair himself argues that ''moderate'' Muslims must do more to combat extremism by resisting what he called ''a completely false sense of grievance against the West.''

''You cannot defeat this extremism through what a government does,'' he told lawmakers on Tuesday. ''You can only defeat it within a community.''

His remarks angered some leaders who said Muslims were again being stigmatized.

Beeston was not known for extremism before the bombings; ever since, it has been the object of microscopic examination by reporters and politicians. The experience has left the neighborhood touchy and defensive, desperate to shed its reputation as a place where deprivation created a crucible of terrorism.

''Beeston could have been anywhere in the country,'' said Mark Harris, leader of Leeds City Council. ''There is nothing there to say they did what they did because of Beeston.''

It is a poor and racially mixed neighborhood of back-to-back row houses with a population of just a few thousand, where successive waves of immigrants from Asia in the 1960's, and now from Eastern Europe and Africa, have spread a tangled overlay on a cityscape forged in Victorian Britain.

The bright pink and turquoise saris of Asian women offer chromatic relief from drab brick homes. There is the Hardy Street Mosque and Mac's Caf?where sweet milky tea costs pennies. There is the Churchill house of ill repute, where Polish women say they cater to young Asian men. And on one corner, said Stewart Shearer, a mixed-race resident, there is a boarded-up home that used to cater to crack dealers.

It was from this neighborhood that three men, Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30; Shehzad Tanweer, 22, and Hasib Mir Hussain, 18, along with Germaine Lindsay, 19, from Aylesbury, north of London, chose to kill themselves, attacking the land that had both nurtured and alienated them.

In conversations over several days with two reporters, people in Beeston expressed shock, confusion and annoyance at the opprobrium the men had brought.

Correction: July 7, 2006, Friday
An article yesterday about the anxiety Britons continue to feel over last year's terrorist bombing in London referred incompletely to the site of some of the reporting. While Karla Adam contributed information from Leeds, Alan Cowell, The Times correspondent, also did much of his reporting from there, then wrote the article in London.